Page 3 of She Who Devours the Stars

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Alignment: Just Outside Gravity’s Guilt Trip above Pelago-9

I didn’t die, which was proof that the universe had a sick sense of humor.

First, there was the airless, endless drop, a body’s worth of gravity yanking me through vacuum and flinging me headlong at the nearest habitable surface. Then, at the last possible nanosecond, the geometry around me snapped into order, and I found myself wedged into the guts of an emergency reentry pod, limbs numb and vision streaked with pinwheels.

This wasn’t like any escape pod I’d ever seen. The Accord called them “Dumb Coffins,” half-plastic shells with three hours of air and the ambiance of a used ashtray. This one was mythtech: black carbon lined the interior like burial cloth, with gold filament twitching under the padding as if it were remembering how to bleed. The harness wasn’t designed for humans, maybe not even for anything with bones, but the fit didn’t care. Mythtech didn’t work through the details; it worked by being legendary. The whole thing hummed with a low, subliminal promise: if you survive, it’s not an accident.

The pod was already screaming. Not with a voice, but with every light, every sensor, every piece of hardware that could get my attention. The display in front of my face blinked through a thousand status messages per second: DECELERATE. SHIELD COMPROMISED. ATMOSPHERIC ENTRY IMMINENT. It tookme three tries to focus my eyes, and when I did, the status bar at the top glowed a sickly green: INCIDENT LEVEL 7—CONTAINMENT BREACH.

I laughed, because the only other option was to piss myself.

My hair floated in null-G, a sweaty halo around my face. The pod drifted sideways, momentum fighting the guidance thrusters with every microsecond. A harness tried to cut me in half. I spat blood, mine, probably, and braced myself as the craft hit the atmosphere.

That’s when the voice came back.

“You are not designed for this velocity,” said Vireleth, and it sounded almost fond. “You may experience discomfort. Or liquefaction.”

“Fuck you,” I croaked. “You could have landed me. You could have—”

“You said you wanted out,” the voice replied, already fading. Why did Vireleth sound like a jilted lover with a flair for melodrama? I’d never dated a spaceship before, and certainly not one with trust issues.

I tried to catch my breath, but the pod’s air tasted of burning polymers and fear.

“Fuck, I hate space.”

The pod bucked and screamed as a shockwave tore past us. The hull temperature spiked, glowing orange then white, and the insulation did what insulation always did: it failed with dignity. Heat wrapped around me, pressure spiked, and my vision tunneled to a point of stuttering black and blue.

Somewhere behind the roar, a last echo of Vireleth came through, wet with static and something like regret: “You never hated space when it moaned back.”

…

Nope. I absolutely was not thinking about that. If I survived this, I was going to need (more) therapy.

Turns out, terminal velocity feels a lot like regret, and for a second, I blacked out. When I came back, the display had gone red, cycling one message: BRACE FOR IMPACT. BRACE FOR IMPACT. BRACE FOR IMPACT. The only thing bracing was the certainty that I was about to become a meme, if there was anyone left alive on Pelago-9 to watch the feed.

I looked down, and the moon loomed huge and ugly, a rusted smear wrapped around a gas giant so obscene it made the whole horizon look diseased. Clouds roiled in permanent sunset. Below, the lights of the Glimmer Zone flickered like they were already mourning me.

The ground got close, fast.

I jammed my hands against the crash bars and screamed, “I hate space!” but the pod drowned me out with a banshee wail and a burst of liquid foam that sealed my mouth shut.

The final seconds stretched out. There’s a myth that time slows down before you die, and it’s true, but only if you’re not a coward. I was a coward, but not in the ways that mattered, so the seconds went like this:

One. The pod hit the first layer of the defense grid and shed half its mass in a spray of decoys. The Accord satellites woke up, tracked my descent, and sent up a storm of antiorbital flak, none of which landed because the pod was too agile for them.

Two. Every display in the pod’s tiny cockpit flashed “CONTAINMENT PRIORITY” and “DISSEMINATION FAILSAFE ARMED.”

Three. I remembered the girl I’d kissed, the scream, the black hole, and the promise I never meant to keep. I wondered if her ghost was watching. I wondered if she’d even remembered my name, and why I couldn’t recall hers? Her taste vanished from my lips the moment I thought about it.

Four. I hit the surface.

For a full minute, I didn’t know if I was alive, dead, or somewhere worse. My ears rang. My head throbbed. I hung upside-down, jammed into a foam cocoon that tasted like old socks. I tried to move and failed, then pushed harder, and the harness gave way with a snap.

I tumbled out of the pod into a world that was too bright, too loud, and entirely wrong.

The air tasted like recycled metal and burned ozone. I blinked the glare away and saw a crater behind me, already half-full of emergency bots scratching at the pod like they were fighting over scraps. The city I’d been aimed at squatted on the horizon, a maze of stacked prefab habs and repair yards, nothing like the gold-lit cathedral I’d just fallen from.